Been having issues trying to use PHPMyAdmin to re-import my whole Drupal installation. Was running into the Max Allowed Packets error. It is a MySQL configuration that you can’t edit through PHPMyAdmin. Could find no help on the MySQL site (no surprise there – horribly indexed in my opinion). Then I stumbled across this nugget of pure gold:

http://smokinggoat.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/max-allowed-packet-problem-with-mamp/

Go there to read the solution (give him the traffic he deserves)

In case it’s down…

1. Find “my-small.cnf” in Applications/MAMP/LIbrary/Share/MySQL/

2. Copy it to the regular MySQL folder in MAMP: Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/

3. Rename it to: “my.cnf”

4. Open it with a text editor and go hunting for Max Allowed Packets (Edit>>Find etc.)

5. Bump the 1M default a bit higher. My drupal sql file was 18MB (mostly taken up by huge node and user tables), and Max Allowed Packets at 2M was sufficient.